


Invisible Border

by TerresDeBrume



Series: SEADLA Verse [1]
Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Adoption, Destined to meet, Gen, Racism, Starting point, You could call this a fixed point in destiny
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-29
Updated: 2013-01-29
Packaged: 2017-11-27 11:16:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/661356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TerresDeBrume/pseuds/TerresDeBrume
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As a God, Odin knows he's bound to meet certain people in his life.</p><p>Years later, he will remember he couldn’t tell which was Loki’s sex, and wonder if it shouldn’t have been a warning sign, after all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Invisible Border

He finds the boy merely moments after slaying the younger of Laufey’s trueborns, a tall lad that towered above him by at least a dozen inches -not that it mattered. Odin has slain more Jotuns today than he killed in the rest of the war, and that makes a great number.  
His body feels numb all over, except for the hole in his face that burns like embers stuck into his skull, the frigid air of Jotunheim gnawing at his skin as if it were a wall of ice that must be destroyed. He feel tired and cold and hungry, he longs for his home and the peace he grew stupidly -naively- accustomed to. He wants to see the wife he left behind and meet the son she wrote of a few months past. Thor will be almost twenty now, a toddler already, and Odin longs to see him.  
He is tired with this war and ready to go home, and perhaps it is what stops his arm when he goes to strike the temple down. A people without its church is a weak people, after all, and less likely to win… but Odin doesn’t strike, and the temple stands, and then he feels it.  
  
Frigga never felt him.  
Odin has no idea why, but the fact remains: she never felt him. Still, the spirit in this house now has been by his side for even longer than Thor’s, his presence just as strong, and the Allfather could not turn his back on it if he wanted to.  
He walks to the centerpiece and feels only half surprised to discover a baby there, even though he spares a moment to wish it didn’t have to be a Frost Giant before he bends to pick the child up and have a look at him.  
  
 _Loki_ , he thinks as he touches the child’s head with the tip of his fingers,  _we meet at last._  
Does he feel it too, that sense of having found someone you were meant to know? Odin has no idea, but Loki’s mouth twists in a toothless baby’s smile and his skin warms under Odin’s fingers, pink spreading over his body like ink in water, until the babe looks just any newborn of Asgard.  
Odin’s lips curl at the corner, the shadow of a smile he didn’t know he had, and he uncovers the baby’s legs to check for its sex… A boy, Odin sees, everything ordinary about him, save the darker line behind his balls which Odin puts down to his newly impaired sight. He tells the babe as much and adds:  
  
“I wasn’t sure what I’d make of you before, but since you look to be an adaptable lad… We might make a civilized man out of you yet.” Odin doesn’t go as far as kissing the boy’s brow, but the thought is there. “Don’t worry. I won’t let these beasts’ blood ruin your life.”  
  
He takes the babe to his camp, and then he takes him home, and when Frigga introduces him to Thor after a bath, the line between his balls his gone, and Odin forgets all about it.  
  
Frigga loves the child on sight. She takes an instant shine to him and her enthusiasm wins Thor over, and after many a plea from Frigga and several delighted screams of ‘Eel bwo, eel bwo!’ From his son, Odin consents to make Loki his second born instead of the ward he’d intended. He likes the lad well enough after all, and he thinks it will be easy to turn him into a true Aesir.  
If that means he grows to hate Frost Giants too, well… What he doesn’t know of cannot hurt him.  
  
(Millenniums later, Loki is screaming and crying all at once, and Odin wonders which in the long line of secrets he kept from his son marked the end of protection and the beginning of damage.)


End file.
